Treasure Hunters failed to question the greed for blood diamonds and was naive
in its execution, says Sameer Rahim

The human desire for pretty rocks certainly pushes us to extremes.The Treasure Hunters (BBC One) promised to explore how we mine diamonds, snuffle for truffles or pan gold – but though mildly informative at times, the show was woefully naive about the physical and ethical dangers involved in the processes it described. The presenters Ellie Harrison and Dallas Campbell were so obsessed with bling that they never paused to think.

Campbell had an especially grating style. First he was slavering over a heavily made-up model wearing millions of pounds of diamonds, and then solemnly reminding us that the gems were only “humble pieces of carbon”. (This was about as much science as we got.) He visited an enormous ship in Namibia that acted as a floating vacuum cleaner, sucking up the sea bed, sifting it for diamonds, and then pumping it back. Campbell, whose trip was facilitated by De Beers jewellers, did not ask a single question about the environmental impact of the practice. The phrase “blood diamond”, or the terrible wars in Africa fuelled by greed for gems went unmentioned.

The programme followed the same pattern for pearls, truffles, opal, ambergris and gold. (A sequence about dinosaur bones seemed out of place.) After watching Campbell poking an oyster’s gonads, we saw Harrison go down a South African gold mine. Although she simpered on about how tough the miners’ jobs were, and gleefully told us that the shaft produces £1 million of gold each day, she did not tell us how much the workers’ earned. Nor did she even allude to the police killing of 34 striking miners at the Marikana platinum mine in 2012.

One bright spot came when Harrison, while investigating ambergris, met perfumer Roja Dove. Deliciously camp and wearing a gold jacket, Dove had a lovely way with words. Wafting a scent at the presenter, he told her to smell the “soft, slightly sweet, balsamic sensuality”. Give that man his own show.